[sugar] Congratulations! but Sugar sucks

[david at lang.hm]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote:

> |> 1. The datastore
> |> 2. OS Updates
> |> 3. File Sharing
> |> 4. Activity Modification
> |> 5. Bitfrost
> |> 6. Power management
>
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:02 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
>> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>> really surprisingly short.  Each item on the list has been debated to a
>>> stationary point over the last two years, so all that is left is to make
>> a
>>> final decision for the engineers to execute.  Each task could be
>> completed
>>> or hugely improved by a single developer in a few months, provided that
>> we
>>> do not allow changes to the requirements, and the developers are not
>> asked
>>> to split their time and focus.
>>
>> I do not believe that either of these statements is correct.
>>
>> We are not lacking in decisions: we have substantially complete
>> designs; we are lacking implementation.
>>
>> Each of your items is not the work of "a single developer in a few
>> months": solving these problems is realistically a year's work at
>> least, if we have a single developer working full time on each.
>
>
> I have experience with numbers 1, 3, and 5, and am the principal person
> responsible for 4 right now. I would say that 3 and 4 are definitely within
> the "single dev in a few months" time frame; depending on the definition, 4
> is in the "as soon as currently applied patches percolate into production"
> time frame. The further work on 4 - already started - is in the area of
> activity signatures, which is actually encroaching on 5. In a few full-time
> months of a single developer, this would put 4 at a place which other
> platforms could envy, and make concrete strides towards 5, to the point
> where security would be better, not worse, than other modern platforms
> (though I agree that there is plenty more work to fulfill the true promise
> of Bitfrost).
>
> I agree that 1 is not so simple; while a rockstar developer might be able to
> solve all our problems in a two-month all-nighter, 6 months to a year is a
> more realistic timeframe to get something really solid and stable.

I think the biggest issue with #1 (and what Ben was trying to point out) 
isn't the amount of work needed to implement something, it's agreeing to 
change from the existing approach, and what new approach to use. there 
have been several different proposals, but until one of them is selected 
there isn't going to be much work done on any of them.

David Lang
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Devel mailing list
Devel at lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel